Reviews

Ignat turns on the television and steps back, the camera panning behind his head placing the spectator into his mind (or into his consciousness). We watch what he watches – a doctor helping a teenager overcome a speech impediment. The two shots that precede the pre-title sequence are a curious opener for a film, but could not be a more appropriate way to begin The Mirror (1974), Tarkovskii's introspective study into memory. The televised examination of the stutterer is one of those rare, inexplicable moments that stand out when reflecting on one's childhood: we cannot control the distinctive images or brief flashes that stick, but for some odd reason they do.

The Mirror is a tremendously personal film, with Tarkovskii's father Arsenii reading his own poetry, and (I assume) many of the past sequences and dreams lifted from the filmmaker's own life (we even see a poster for the director's second endeavor Andrei Roublev (1966) during a pan in the phone conversation). Tarkovskii turns the abstract, the metaphysical and the spiritual into something concrete in his images. The film is loosely structured playing as if a recollection of memories with each scene a strong impression from the past. The rich greens, the moment with the fence breaking and doctor laughing, the gust of wind as he walks away and the burning barn all seem as though Tarkovskii is reconstructing vivid incidents from his youth and transcribing them to celluloid. Tarkovskii often employs his trademark meditative long takes; each shot an investigation into motion as the filmmaker dwells on subtle textures such as the dripping of water, the river stream and the strength of the wind.

The title The Mirror evokes a reflection, possibly the way we reflect upon and dream about our own past experiences. Our nostalgic and imaginative visions from the past maintain a realness that "objective" history lacks. In the final moments of our life, all we have are our learned experiences and flashes from our memories as Tarkovskii gives us a bird leaping from the hands of the dying man cutting to the sun setting in the open field, the childhood house and the mother laying in the grass.

After a genre film-style zoom from a man screaming in a black abyss, the title card tells us that the movie is "a non-science-fiction, not quite realistic and not strictly historical film." Ivan Vasi'lievich Changes Profession (1962) starts off as an absurdist comedy as the mad scientist Shurak watches his television and accidentally sucks up his cat into his vacuum cleaner (Shurak using two staple domestic products of the Brezhnev years). The film becomes a science-fiction adventure as Shurak's newly operational time machine unwittingly sends Ivan the Terrible into 1970s Moscow, forcing the old Russian czar to adjust to the struggles of modern life. And finally, Ivan Vasi'lievich transforms into a musical as Shurak's apartment superintendent Ivan Vasi'lievich and Miloslavksy perform a dance in the sixteenth century echoing Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, Part II (1958), but this film would have never survived the harsh censorship of Late Stalinism. The Soviet citizen during the Brezhnev years saw an increase in the standard of living prompting a greater middle class and permanently instilling a lifestyle of consumerism. While the popularity of television was enormous, movie attendance in the Soviet Union was also massive. GOSKINO, under the leadership of Filipp Ermash, gave entertainment value and the sensibilities of the audience highest priority during film production. Genre films, such as the melodrama, crime, sci-fi, romance or adventure film, were fundamental to the years of stagnation. The silly, surreal, sci-fi-adventure-comedy precedes Back to the Future (1985) and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989) by over a decade criticizing the modern day world as the suspicion Ivan the Terrible is told, "you'd be poisoned with can food then vodka."

Nine Days of One Year (1962) was directed by Mikhail Romm and is part of the Khrushchev Thaw in Soviet filmmaking. The premise of the Cold War-era film is ballsy as it concerns the development of weapons of mass destruction. Mitya Gusev, a talented physicist, desires to harness his scientific discovery for the benefit of communism (by providing the energy for his brethren), but others along his path prompt Gusev to use his breakthrough for war. The unique narrative that highlights only nine days over the course of a year is particularly striking. By privileging only a few moments, the film creates an underlying importance in every waking moment. Gusev possesses the innocence and "childishness" (the "adults" being apathetic) that categorized the heroes of the Khrushchev Thaw; Gusev describes himself as having "more enthusiasm than brains." Although Aleksey Batalov maintains many of the same attributes in Gusev that he carried as Boris in The Cranes are Flying (1957) (including his ultimate sacrifice for the greater good), in Nine Days of One Year he is cold, distant and unaffectionate towards Lyolya failing to even notice the robe that she's worn for the entirety of the month. Instead of simply filming men debating the fate of the world, Nine Days also simultaneously portrays the budding and eventual disintegration of a marriage as we dive into the depths of Lyolya's psyche as she tells her husband, "(she) is a woman, not a domestic pet." Her viewpoint is equally privileged to that of Gusev adding a greater dimension to the film as well as adding to its overall success. The opening of the film spares no time for exposition. It grabs you by the collar from the opening shot as we fly over a miniature towards the Institute. The form in the film is remarkable. In one instance, the camera drops down to the dinner table as if a bomb is being dropped on the discussion. The scene is concluded pulling back into the sky as if detracting from the crucial moment in order to recognize the smallness of the conversation in the grand scheme of humanity. While there are shots of pure dynamism (rapid whip pans, Dutch angles and quick cutting), Romm often favors a wide lens, low angles and elaborate in depth staging in long takes to carry forth the narrative. Romm gives us an incredible extreme long shot of Gusev walking to the lab on the eighth day across a blank brick wall. The stark emptiness within the frame creates a canvas for the audience to project Gusev's feelings – how does the failure to discover thermonuclear energy weigh on Gusev, and most of all, is the ultimate sacrifice worth it? The film also poses an interesting question earlier on – is the basis of humanity's perfection measured in its ability to exterminate itself?

Circus (1936) is a romantic-farce-musical directed by Grigorii Aleksandrov (1903-1983) who started as an assistant director to Sergei Eisenstein before graduating into the ranks of the great Soviet musical directors. Lyubov Orlova, the wife of Aleksandrov (and incidentally Stalin's favorite movie star), stars as Marion Dixon, a circus performer who flees to the Soviet Union only to be plagued by her troubled past of committing "history's biggest crime" of sleeping with a colored man and conceiving a colored child. Dixon falls in love with a theater director but is blackmailed by a Western man who has knowledge of her illustrious affair.

While the arrival of sound brought a regression in the aesthetics of cinema, Circus manages to maintain the specificities of the medium offering spectacular visual sequences and technical perfection that makes the film seem rather Hitchockian. There are moments of Chaplinesque physical comedy (as well as a character physically resembling the Tramp (Chaplin's The Circus (1928) was made only six years earlier)) such as the man pulling the feather from the swan, using the feather as a pen, before putting it back into the swan. Aleksandrov stages the two protagonists falling in love in a spectacular shot as the camera pans down from Marion's face, to the couple holding hands in the reflection of the piano before rotating 180 degrees.

Stalinist cinema, also known as socialist realism, abandoned the formalism that had categorized the Soviet films of the 1920s, to instead focus on wholesome entertainment and strong characters and plot intended for the masses. The films were similar to Hollywood narratives but located on the opposite ideological spectrum as they consisted of a naive, but good-natured hero developing the communist consciousness. Like, Chapaev (1934), Circus embodies the synthesis of ideology and entertainment that the Soviet center-moderate critics sought to achieve. At the climax of the film, Marion is exposed in front of the circus audience with the blackmailer claiming her actions justify her "banish(ment) from civilized society." The film portrays the socialist Soviet Union as a place of acceptance and understanding, compared to the harsh reality of race relations in the United States and other Western nations. The last minutes of Circus drive the message home as masses of people march through the streets carrying flags and banners of Lenin and Stalin as Marion turns to her comrade proclaiming, "now I understand."

The Trial of Three Million is a slapstick comedy telling the story of three different thieves who all maintain different forms: one as a petty thief, another as a sophisticated international thief and finally a bourgeois banker. A banker sells his land for three million rubles but is unable to deposit his money because it is the weekend. Tapioca, the small time crook, and Cascarilla, the international thief, both learn of the banker's possession and in a string of events, both end up attempting to rob him on the same evening. The end of the film is Brechtian in nature as Cascarilla accuses every person in the courtroom of thievery before dumping the money into the crowd.

The film marks a clear development for director Yakov Protazanov (1881-1945) from his earlier film Father Sergius (1917) where the distinctions between the cinematic and theatrical were ambiguous. Although much of the comedy in the film derives from the exaggerated actor's performances and Chaplinesque blocking, humor also comes from experiments with subjectivity as Tapioca observes the cat with his stolen binoculars. Protazanov uses the same methods as Griffith and those that would later be refined by Hitchcock, such as cross cutting and the use of close-ups to build suspense (but in this case for comedic purposes) such as the sequence with the banker driving home as the two thieves linger in the main room and Tapioca losing his shoe during the heist. The film aligns with the center-moderate view of Soviet film criticism favored by Piotrovksy and Lunacharsky, who demanded films be engrossing while also delivering an ideology. Although not enjoying the same level of innovation of other films of the period, The Trial of Three Million makes a point to show that all three characters are thieves and that ultimately a wealthy banker survives the same way as a petty thief – by taking from others.

Mother follows a divided family during a workers strike in the Russian Revolution of 1905. After the father is killed in a skirmish and the son is sentenced to work at a labor camp, the mother revises her ideology and helps to plan a prison escape. The film concludes with troops subduing the revolt and the death of the mother and son at the hands of the soldiers. Vsevstol Pudovkin's (1893-1957) method of montage more closely resembles Kuleshov's "brick laying" method, where the combination of cutting helps to more effectively convey or dramatize an event, in contrast to Eisenstein who advocated a montage of colliding images to generate a meaning that cannot be depicted on film. The film may be silent, but the sounds are transmitted from the image. We feel the silence drop in the bar as the father demands vodka. Mother marks a clear development in the structure and formation of the motion picture, but modern day audiences may be desensitized to the films spell. The film utilizes a cinematic language familiar to the contemporary moviegoer, but we may take the easily followed, continuous action and cutting that develops suspense for granted as we witness everyday movie vocabulary in its conception. While Pudovkin shared different theoretical views from Eisenstein, the film includes abstract sequences as well. After the death of the father, Pudovkin cuts to several images of trees blowing in the wind as a break in the action. He draws a parallel between blocks of ice plummeting down a river and the crowds of people marching, while also establishing simultaneous action for a crucial plot point near the end of the film. Mother also experiments with subjectivity, as we iris to the mother's memory of her son hiding weapons (using an x-ray vision effect to show the storage beneath the floorboards) and as we are given images of water and a child after Pavel reads the getaway plan as if to show his yearning for freedom. While the portrayal and privileging of a hero, the prison escape sequence and the climactic chase renders Mother rather Hollywood, ultimately the film is too tragic to be a Hollywood film.